Lenovo may be riding well on its (or Motorola’s) smartphone success, but its PC business has gone completely awry. A serious security threat has now been detected in an Adware which comes pre-installed on Lenovo PCs, which could allow remote hackers to see your entire browsing data, and possibly, your complete PC data.
The Adware, named Superfish, which comes pre-installed on Lenovo PCs, uses a man-in-the-middle certificate to forcefully put ads in your internet browsers. However, a potential hacker could easily compromise the service and gain access to whatever you have browsed or have been browsing on your browser.
In fact, Lenovo itself confirmed consumer suspicion when company representative Mark Hopkins explained that Superfish had been ‘temporarily removed’ as the adware had ‘some issues’. The adware vendor was later asked to push an internal update to the existing version, probably to correct the security loophole.
Moreover, what’s frustrating is the fact that even if you un-install Superfish, the man-in-the-middle certificate it brought along with it, doesn’t get removed. This further ensures that the threat stays in your machine, with even greater risk.
Spoofed up banking websites, and stealing of e-banking information is obviously the first and major concern here. Moreover, those social networking accounts you operate, are also in jeopardy as users usually tend to save form data in the browser so that repeated logins aren’t required.
However, this isn’t the first time that Lenovo PCs have come under scrutiny. Earlier in 2013, a report in The Telegraph confirmed that some of UK Government’s most secured networks like the GCHQ, MI 5 and MI6 have banned the use of Lenovo products in any manner.
